Top 35 Ed Kowalczyk Quotes

I always thought it odoriferous for people to go about trying to pummel others with their ideas.

Part of being an artist is that you want to express yourself to as many people as possible. But you don’t want to exclude anyone.

Critics are critics: their job is to find things wrong with people.

We’ve been slighted in the press for being heartfelt.

All my favorite artists were pretty serious in the sense that their music was something I could sink my teeth into, from Peter Gabriel to U2 to these artists that made me want to read the lyrics and dig into it.

It really has become the singular motivation in my life – to surrender to the art and to the free expression of what I may be experiencing in my life spiritually. It is really hard in the face of people who don’t get it, but what do you do?

It’s something I’ve always been passionate about – which is the power of rock and roll itself. I’m a walking example of its power, ’cause I was totally altered in the seminal years of Live by bands like U2 and R.E.M., U2 in particular.

I was into all of the Pennsylvania teams at some point in my childhood. I would flip back and forth between the Pirates and the Phillies, and I was always a Steelers fan but not much of an Eagles fan. Then I became kind of a band nerd in school, and I went the music route.

From the very beginning, we were all a hundred and ten percent about the music, from the very early days when we could barely play our instruments, and we were just covering other people’s songs when we were in high school.

Anarchy would be a world that nobody felt responsible for, that nobody felt any sort of love for. When there’s real intelligence happening, when there’s real love happening, there’s a sense of responsibility: Hey, we’ve got to take care of this place and each other.

I love Peter Gabriel, and I’ve come so close to working with him a few times. We were on a movie soundtrack together, but we didn’t actually write together.

The Web has incredible potential for an artist who keeps in touch with millions of people.

Our success just flies in the face of critics or people who would rather that we just failed… because we didn’t fit into the style of the times or our lyrics were too upfront or too earnest or whatever.

I grew up in an area that was the typical city that was a racially divided and economically segregated place. And it had a big influence on me.

I feel proud to be a part of rock n’ roll and the whole tradition of rock n’ roll.

Music, in its clearest and simplest form, can be a catalyst to thought, but that’s about it.

We came from a small town where there was no music scene or no other bands, and we decided to put ours together and go for it.

There’s a lot of spirituality and hope in our music that I think people are catching on to. It’s not punk, it’s not Green Day, not Offspring, not Soundgarden, not Stone Temple Pilots, not all of the other bands that are coming out.

We’ve never been satisfied with just making ‘me’ music. What we’re doing is trying to go to a place of some reverence.

With every kid, there has just been a deepening of my humanity, because there’s no more of a feet-on-the-ground moment than having a child.

When you’re 19, girlfriends are girlfriends. Then you start thinking about the rest of your life and stuff. I don’t know; something happens with your glands. Your alimony gland.

I think ‘cool’ is overrated.

We really want the whole world to know about Live and to experience us.

We never really write ‘love’ love songs. There’s always something twisted about them. But as far as love songs, women just became way more important to us after we turned 21, as a band in general. Kind of broke up our boyhood solidarity as we started branching out into babes.

I’ve never had trouble finding inspiration for new songs, no matter what I’m doing.

The way you perform really depends on the way you live your life. It’s not two separate things.

Arenas, to me, and especially sheds, are really great venues. You get that sea of humanity, but everybody can still see it and hear it. And that’s really important to us.

Music is a spiritual event and a means to realize freedom.

We don’t want Offspring-itis, Green Day-itis: you know, that thing where bands are all over the place at once, getting everything at once – major airplay on radio, major airplay on MTV.

With ‘Mental Jewelry,’ we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to get something happening. I think we lost some of the personality in the music. ‘Throwing Copper”s mission was to begin to get some of that back.

To make music that means something, you kind of have to drop the cool. You have to be prepared and willing to be uncool.

I remember people telling me that at 5 1/2 minutes long, ‘Lightning Crashes’ would never be a hit song.

It’s always so rewarding, gratifying to me, as an artist and a writer, to see how this music gets more important for a lot of people as time goes by. And it’s not just nostalgia. It’s a feeling of it’s really relevant to their lives, even though it’s 20 or 25 years old or more.

I hit this point – I guess you’d say an end of a chapter – where I felt like I kind of did everything. I wasn’t interested in music. It was a really strange feeling, and needless to say, it freaked me out a little bit. I really started to go inward and say, ‘Hey, what is this about?’

What I think shines through for us is that we have a real respect for the music and a real reverence.